Alphaville

30 November 1999

Jean Luc Godard (1965) with Live performance by London based sound artist - Scanner One night only - 9pm, Friday April 4, 2003 Presented by PICA at Cinema Paradiso, James St, Northbridge Performance with film projection (dur: 100 min) Innovative London-based soundscaper and ambient electronicist Scanner performs a live, improvised sampled and remixed score to Jean-Luc Godard's mid-60s, pulp sci-fi, modernist classic Alphaville. 'A dazzling amalgam of film noir and science fiction in which tough gumshoe Lemmy Caution turns inter-galactic agent to re-enact the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice in conquering Alpha 60... Godard's theme is alienation in a technological society, but his shotgun marriage between the poetry of legend and the irreverence of strip cartoons takes the film into entirely idiosyncratic areas.' Tom Milne, Time Out 'With Alphaville, Godard achieved one of his Sixties dreams - to make a Bond movie his way, complete with car chases, gun play and a nominal sci-fi plot. His greatest touch was - and remains - his simplest: to create a futuristic urban dystopia in which the words 'poetry', 'conscience' and 'love' are outlawed by filming in the most brutalist modern architecture Paris had to offer in 1965. No need for big budget sets.' Chris Drake, The Independent 'Everything has been said, provided words do not change their meanings, and meanings their words...Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along. ' Alpha 60 A cult classic and a film that pushed the very medium itself beyond its limits, Alphaville has intrigued me since I was a student. The unforgettable dirty grinding vocalisations of the computer voice haunt electronic music today and the fusing of 'film noir' and science fiction inspired a generation of film makers. Alphaville is a place where emotion is forbidden and poetry is forgotten, ruled by logic, a super computer. With its abstract, political and intellectual space-chase across the glass and metal landscape of futuristic Paris, we are caught within a film that dissolves boundaries between fiction and documentary, between actors and the characters they play, a situation which prevails in musical trends, with the divide between what is 'real' and 'not real' within music. Electronica shares the spirit of Alphaville, using a low budget style of creativity that captures the spirit of the time, often characterised by a cold, dystopian futuristic conscience. His use of sound on this and subsequent movies is extraordinary and my live improvisation within the frame of this work is a way of crossing time boundaries and exploring connections within his work. It is curious to watch Alphaville today and too easily forget that the technical innovations of this film have been so widely absorbed that you can watch them today and hardly sense any of what was once new. With its odd camera angles, funky cuts, and offbeat characters and dialogue, Godard rebelled against the studio norms of the 1950s and 1960s aligning himself with other astute directors of the period: Rohmer, Resnais, Truffaut and Rivette, all figures of the Nouvelle Vague. Alphaville is a still a radical film that transforms the everyday into something baffling and intriguing. Everything may be familiar but nothing is recognisable. - Robin Rimbaud